An Interview with Ron Sexsmith: Long Player, Late Bloomer

I wrote about Ron Sexsmith a few years ago and how consistently great his albums have been for the past fifteen years. It turns out that his last one, Exit Strategy of the Soul, which I thought was fantastic, didn't sell very well, and neither did the one before. Ron apparently got pretty depressed about what felt like his disappearing career and even considered giving up music for a while.

Some of this mood is cataloged in Love Shines, a new documentary about the making of Sexsmith's most recent album, Long Player, Late Bloomer. Ron's management was nice enough to send me the DVD, which isn't available yet, because I was interviewing him over the phone for Time Out Boston.

The interview has just been posted, and you can read it here. He is one of my heroes, so it was an honor to speak to him.


About the album, Long Player, Late Bloomer is another wonderful collection of songs, and a fine place to start if you're not already a fan. During the first few listens, I'll admit I was put off by the production. Sexsmith apparently wanted a more commercial sound on this album and brought on a bigtime producer, Bob Rock, to gloss things up a bit. A lot of the songs, as a result, feel less intimate, vaguely smoothed over. One track, "No Help At all," has a slinky synthesized riff played on a keyboard that sounds like it has been set to "Disco Flute."

Pretty soon, though, the lyrics and the melodies start to shine through the saran wrap. I even began to appreciate some of Rock's touches, especially on songs like "Believe It When I See It" and "Love Shines," where his production gives the songs an anthemic energy that is something new in Sexsmith's music.

Long Player, Late Bloomer also feels cohesive in a way that most of Ron's albums do not, because there is an emotional arc that connects the songs to each other, involving, I think, the descent into depression and the slow climb back out. The album begins with a song about purely personal gripes ("Get In Line") and then moves from confusion about the purpose behind things ("The Reason Why") to a kind of a cosmic despair ("Believe It When I See It"), which is probably the most pessimistic song Sexsmith has ever written.

After a glimmer of light on "Miracles," we get "No Help At All" (the disco flute track) which begins to view the depression from outside, with some tongue-in-cheek humor, a signal that the darkness is clearing. And the album then moves from guarded hopefulness to, finally, a kind of radiant acceptance.

Not every song fits with this concept -- even Willie Nelson can't hold an entire concept album together -- but the odd-man-out tracks from the second half of the album (which is a bit weaker) still capture a branching out, a growing interest in the world, that fits with the idea of moving from inward gloom to something larger than the self.

For a while, I've been giving people Sexsmith mix CDs, and when they don't quite get my enthusiasm -- and many of them don't -- I end up stammering something about melodic complexity or sincerity or about how well the lyrics are put together. I have a hard time explaining why this music is so important to me, why it keeps on giving me sustenance when so many other works of art that I like, from movies to books, seem to exhaust themselves after a few encounters.

All I can say -- and this is just another kind of stammering -- is that I can hear the same divine spark in Sexsmith that Beethoven heard in Schubert, and that anyone who listens to Winterreise or the last piano sonata or dozens of Ron's songs can feel as well. That this spark can be communicated, and is offered to us for the price of a little attention, is something of a miracle -- one of the miracles that, as Ron sings, keep appearing in broad daylight. Pick up this album or any of his others: I hope the spark comes across.

An Interview with Tim Parks

An interview I did with Tim Parks for the literary magazine Redivider is online here. As I've written earlier, I think Parks is one of the really great living writers. (Judge Savage is my current favorite among his novels, and the Adultery collection is probably my favorite modern collection of essays.)

Anyway, it was an immense and slightly mortifying honor to get to correspond with him. The interview takes a little while to get going - mostly because of my stammering attempts to impress him with my questions - but eventually gets interesting. I hope everyone enjoys it. Here is a favorite exchange:

AA: You mentioned earlier that some of these inflated literary reputations might have to do with America’s economic power. How do you see these two things affecting each other?

TP: Akshay, you hardly need me to clarify that for you… Do you? It isn’t obvious?

AA: Not entirely. I can see how America’s economic power might help spread the English language, but why would it compel praise for so-so art from people in other countries?

TP: This is rather extraordinary to me. It seems such an obvious equation. The world, certainly my part of the world, looks to America and the Anglo-Saxon culture in general as a model of the future, a motor of new fashion, the new thing. This despite all the hostility to American foreign policy. Books that are best sellers or much admired in the US are more or less automatically translated in Europe and other countries, because offering insight into the culture that drives the world. A best seller in Serbia, or Norway, or Kenya simply does not draw this attention. A brilliant writer in Croatia might easily be completely ignored, unless some political aspect of his work intersects with international interest. And reputation travels. Nobody needs to “compel praise”. It takes an extremely independent mind to read an author who comes on a tidal wave of hype and assess the material for what it is. Most people really do accept celebrity for quality. They do not question it. Add to this that very few countries have a tradition of independent criticism and the picture is complete. In Italy education does not train kids to imagine the majority might be wrong. It’s bad taste to scorn something universally admired. It’s unpleasant. Newspapers and publishers are owned by the same companies and work together and a journalist simply doesn’t set about taking to pieces a book that has been highly praised elsewhere and for which a great deal of money has been paid. At most they might choose not to talk about them.

Note, it is not a question of spreading the English language. Hardly anyone is reading Delillo or Franzen in English here. They are simply automatic exports the way our cinemas are automatically filled with the top ten Hollywood film, dubbed. But this was ever the way with the dominant power in the world. The Roman empire at its height was not admiring works coming out of Carthage or Londinium, nor was the British empire at its height paying much attention to anything from elsewhere, while all the world was reading Byron… To imagine that the success of books really depends on a large number of independent critical minds arriving at a positive judgment is simply not to pay attention to what’s going on. Obviously, certain qualities are required, but once the tidal wave of received opinion has begun to roll, success is guaranteed.